Phil Smeeton's Tech Thinking Blog

Discover (and fix) your saboteurs Buy a personality assessment (Know yourself) Find out what the latest in demand IT credentials are (Keep your skills current) Consider hiring a life coach or finding a mentor (People with mentors succeed more than those without one) Set written goals for 2023 (people with written goals earn 9 times as much as those that don't in a lifetime) Have a wealth plan, fitness plan, beauty plan. Deal with any anxiety with meditation apps like Calm, Headspace Get fit by walking and running Stay in touch with your GP/medics, have regular checks, blood work Use a wearable fitness band, monitor sleep, activity, health, make sure your not missing anything important.

 This post is about using newly invented massive building automation to rebuild an entire country every 10 years using the latest knowledge and research on human environments. The idea is that if you completely rebuild an entire country every ten years you can incorporate the latest research and understanding of human environments and therefore increase productivity, safety, health and happiness of the citizens. This massive scale automation will use newly created materials to create thousands or even millions of buildings quickly and to modern specifications. In terms of preserving the existing buildings that a number of people will want preserving, I recommend extending the Google Earth project and move it into the metaverse adding richness and detail to each building creating an opportunity to experience the old buildings any time..

With the carbon argument for in person sales calls becoming more difficult by the year I see online virtual sales calls a solid solution for future business and trade. I think that some in person meetings are still viable and valuable and when used in proportions are valid now and in the future. To strengthen my argument for online virtual sales calls I'd like to use an example. Imagine a sales manager who wants to make one hundred calls, across 10 different countries usually most people would say to this guy, get ready for flying thousands of miles and staying in many hotels, lets take a look at what is happening using an application like MS Teams. With virtual meeting capabilities like MS Teams sales professionals can touch their prospects with extreme speed and efficiency. According to an authoritative source relationship building using virtual meeting systems is the same as in person although it takes slightly longer to develop the relationship using virtual techniques. I wou...

As some of you may know I am a certified life coach and therefore I think that I use my time well, so as well as having three vacations this summer I have also written a new tech book called '2 Pixels' during the past 10 months. If you like my blogs you will love the book as I write more about some of the topics in my blog as well as additional original and unique content. One of the potential uses of the book is the re-creation of every advanced application found online and in the mobile space. What I mean is that should there be an apocalyptic event and we have to re-build the internet for some reason the book can be used as a guide to quickly advance to the stage we are at in 2022. '2 Pixels, A philosophy of the future of IT' will be available soon.

Thinking about the philosophy of virtual reality I'd like us to consider assets like YouTube and in particular ASMR videos. Thinking back to the emergence of ASMR videos we could see that the ASMR artist was creating a virtual reality like experience for the user. So the ASMR videos presuppose in this case that we want VR to be like a version of reality. Other examples of VR like the metaverse promise a more abstract type of reality, a reality where the digital assets are more significant and an accurate simulation of the world around us has less emphasis. Are we seeing a shift in what we value?, possibly, although I think metaverse users value reality as much as non-metaverse users. The metaverse is perfect for users that have grown up in a digital world and value digitally created objects, we can see that the metaverse users will find the more digital and less simulated realities interesting and exciting. Another way of stating this is that the modern metaverse user values the di...

Everyone loves installing the latest app onto their phone, what wonderful functionality awaits the user? When thinking of an operating system like iOS, how many apps should ideally be installed on the device, simple enough question. Well the answer depends on what types of app are installed, for example the types of app we have installed slightly change the utility of the device. If we install apps to control our home we see the iPhone turning more into a remote control device. If the apps are mainly to order food we see the device becoming an ordering device. No problems, well everything is fine until we appreciate the user experience, does an iPhone really make a good controller for home devices? So the main takeaway is that the apps installed on a device like iPhone are influential in terms of  device user experience and therefore the types of apps you have installed matter. Another way of thinking about this is that you can make the iPone a better or worse user experience (in t...

I would like to start by comparing in-person meetings with virtual meetings. During in-person meetings there are a number of opportunities, firstly we have lie detection, whether the humans in the meeting are telling the truth and how accurately they are speaking. Secondly we have the issue of trust, whether the people in the in-person meeting are trustworthy and if so, how much? Both of these aspects are slightly more difficult in virtual meetings than in person meetings. It might be worth building in trust and lie detection systems into video calling applications. I see this potential difference being addressed as virtual meeting software evolves and we might end up in a situation where the virtual meeting can create higher levels of trust and truth detection.